Backpacks are being expelled from more and more schools

For years the issue, in parental eyes, with school backpacks was that they had gotten to be too much — too big and too heavy, with potentially harmful ramifications for youthful bodies. Today the pendulum appears to be swinging in the opposite direction, as a succession of schools, for a variety of reasons, have banned backpacks altogether. And that, too, has been met with criticism.

The Rev. Kregg Hochhalter, dean of students at Trinity High School in Dickinson, N.D. — one of two North Dakota schools to put the issue on the map this week — explained that “backpacks are a vessel” and that the ban had to do with school shootings but also was meant to keep water and soft-drink bottles, iPhones, iPads, computers from getting “in the way of true education.”

Students at the Catholic school are allowed to bring backpacks into the building but must leave them in their lockers during the school day, the Omaha television station KMTV reported.

In instituting the bans this year, Trinity and Dickinson neighbor Hagen Junior High join a roster that includes schools in New York state, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Wisconsin with backpack restrictions or prohibitions on the books.

In suburban Milwaukee, where Waukesha West High School has required since 2012 that backpacks be kept in lockers once students arrive at school, students and parents, according to a local Patch report, have expressed frustration. One mother reportedly said that if weapons were the chief concern then the bags would not be allowed on school grounds at all, theorizing that administrators were instead looking to establish a pretext to search lockers for drugs. “I think this is giving them the right to search lockers without probable cause,” she is quoted as having said.

Said one student in a Philadelphia-area school district where a ban was introduced last fall: “They’re concerned about drugs, guns, weapons, alcohol, and no one really does that stuff.”